The Media World of ISIS

By Rosemary Pennington

From efficient instructions on how to kill civilians to horrifying videos of beheadings, no terrorist organization has more comprehensively weaponized social media than ISIS. Its strategic, multiplatformed campaign is so effective that it has ensured global news coverage and inspired hundreds of young people around the world to abandon their lives and their countries to join a foreign war. The Media World of ISIS explores the characteristics, mission, and tactics of the organization's use of media and propaganda. Contributors consider how ISIS's media strategies imitate activist tactics, legitimize its self-declared caliphate, and exploit narratives of suffering and imprisonment as propaganda to inspire followers. Using a variety of methods, contributors explore the appeal of ISIS to Westerners, the worldview made apparent in its doctrine, and suggestions for counteracting the organization's approaches. Its highly developed, targeted, and effective media campaign has helped make ISIS one of the most recognized terrorism networks in the world. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of its strategies—what worked and why—will help combat the new realities of terrorism in the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253045959

Book preview

Introduction

Michael Krona

Rosemary Pennington

IN AUGUST 2014, only weeks after the first rare public appearance by the mythical Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul for his initial address to the global Muslim religious community as appointed caliph and leader of ISIS, the now-infamous video showing the beheading of kidnapped US citizen James Foley was released. Titled A Message to America, it was filmed against a desert background, with Foley in an orange jumpsuit, on his knees. Behind Foley stood his black-dressed executioner, his face covered. In English and with a London accent, the executioner, Mohamed Emwazi (who became known as Jihadi John) spoke directly into the camera, arguing for why Foley needed to die. Foley himself was forced to read a scripted statement blaming the US government for his fate. The video then ended with his beheading.

As a marketing product, the video went viral and reached a global audience.

As propaganda, the video had a clear message and was a wake-up call for many governments.

As a mediation of torture, the video was unfortunately only evidence of what would follow.

Even though such videos have long been produced by other organizations, this particular video clearly illustrated a deliberate strategy of mediation by ISIS—a strategy that aimed to gain global attention through the theatrical beheading of a Westerner and to simultaneously convey the message of the organization as a global phenomenon itself. This was only highlighted by using a man brought up in the UK and speaking English as Foley’s executioner.

Mediating Terror

The theater of terror, the desire among terrorist organizations for public exposure and maximum marketing value, is of great importance for ISIS. This does not make them unique in any way; however, their ability and success in communicating what is now one of the most recognized brands in not only the internal jihadosphere but in the entire world separates them from both previous and present groups. Its predecessor, and the organization from which the ISIS of today was born, al-Qaeda, made this strategy of terror through global exposure all too visible with the horrific yet theatrical attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Happening in real time in front of a global audience, witnessed in television news coverage and reproduced through various visual media for years to come, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were orchestrated with a clear marketing strategy. Since then, the development of new and innovative communication technologies has altered the media pretext and conditions for terrorist organizations. What ISIS has done is to adapt to this new media reality, balancing the need for global exposure with a propaganda strategy implemented to target specific audiences with certain messages, characterized by not only depictions of attacks on enemies but also through communication and positive narratives about the organization itself.

If we were to ask a random person on the street in basically any Western country about what ISIS is and stands for, the answer would most certainly refer to the type of violence, executions, and brutality exemplified by the video of James Foley. As true as that association would be, the media world of ISIS, in particular after the declaration of the caliphate on June 29, 2014, has expanded into a virtual universe with particles that go far beyond this depicted brutality. Producing a plethora of propaganda narratives—including stories about the peaceful and just caliphate, featuring happy children, a functioning state and welfare system as well as the eulogization of martyrs, and discussion of the religious tenets and political history justifying their actions—ISIS’s media industry has continuously managed to produce and communicate stories designed to appeal to a global audience. The products of this industry have helped attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters to join the so-called state, helped inspire attacks around the world, produced fear in many communities, and provoked military reactions from adversaries—making the media world of ISIS a highly relevant object of study. This is particularly so as ISIS’s media apparatus has seemed to influence other groups who are currently mimicking and learning from the ways ISIS has used its strong propaganda machinery to increase exposure, recruitment, identity building, and territorial expansion. For instance, since the entrance of ISIS on the global stage of terrorism, the group’s main rival al-Qaeda’s central and regional branches have refined and increased their media propaganda distribution, with a specific focus on international audiences.

The questions at the heart of this volume are: What are the core dimensions of ISIS’s use of media and propaganda? What are the characteristics of the group’s messaging that have contributed to the unprecedented number of foreigners joining this terrorist organization, and how does its propaganda coincide with other sociocultural and political developments? And maybe above all, how do different media strategies and different media content work to legitimize ISIS’s notion of its self-declared caliphate, its state project, which is so heavily amplified in its propaganda?

This book aims to address these and other questions as well as contribute to a holistic and in-depth understanding of the media machinery and virtual universe of one of the most recognized and well-known terrorist organizations in modern history. Taking a holistic approach to this topic could be considered both generalizing and bold at the same time; however, it is motivated by our desire to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds working on this issue to understand how different perspectives produce different insights.

There is a wealth of material being published about the Islamic State, for obvious reasons. Leaving aside the vast amount of individual journal articles published on the topic, many of the books written about ISIS have been produced by journalists, individuals working within the intelligence sector, academics situated within disciplines such as political science or international relations, as well as practitioners or analysts connected to different private institutions.

ISIS Media in View

As ISIS started to appear in mainstream news media reporting, influencing political debates in the Western world and the Gulf region, several publications dealing with the organization from different perspectives emerged. We can divide this literature into two major sections. The first section is made up of extensive analytical works, mainly aimed at nonspecialist audiences and published in news outlets such as The Atlantic¹ or BuzzFeed, but also of course academic outlets and academic journals.² The second section consists of a rapidly expanding body of more rigorous books and works coming from a variety of both professional practices (journalism, intelligence agencies) and academic disciplines.

One of the first and most ambitious publications on the topic is West Point Military Academy’s The Group That Calls Itself a State: Understanding the Evolution and Challenges of the Islamic State, in which a large portion of analytical details on ISIS’s evolution and political background is combined with an examination of organizational structure.³ This includes sections on the industrial media operations; however, these sections cannot be considered extensive. There are interesting discussions of how ISIS conducts its information and media operations, but it is placed in a larger political and military framework, not a communication framework. Military and terrorism expert Loretta Napoleoni takes a similar approach in her book The Islamist Phoenix: The Islamic State and the Redrawing of the Middle East.⁴ She provides a balanced and in-depth description of the geopolitical context from which ISIS arose and highlights how the group has been given a chance to develop in the ashes of prolonged conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Napoleoni chronicles how the group has grown in tune with modernization and currently constitutes a criminal enterprise with deep understanding of not only media technology but Middle East politics and religious affiliations as well.

Benjamin Hall is one of several journalists who has published books on the subject over the last few years. His Inside ISIS: The Brutal Rise of a Terrorist Army contains several layers of description concerning ISIS strategic actions and puts a strong focus on the violent and brutal dimensions of the group’s emergence as well as its ongoing military and media operations.⁵ His journalistic background is evident in the devotion of several chapters focusing on the beheadings of Western journalists and aid workers and the part these acts played in the initial phases of ISIS’s information and social media strategies. Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan’s ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror looks closely at and engages with the historical evolution of ISIS all the way back to the tidings of al-Zarqawi and AQI but then shifts focus to the current establishment of the caliphate and in particular the information structure and operations of ISIS messaging.⁶ Abdel Bari Atwan, in Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, dissects the diverse methods of recruitment used by ISIS, with particular focus on how digital and social media are facilitated in relation to the ideological warfare of the group.⁷

Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger’s ISIS: The State of Terror almost exclusively focuses on the volume of output from ISIS central media command, with particular focus on the propaganda magazine Dabiq and widespread video series.⁸ It touches on how the group relies on Twitter and other social networks in their propaganda machinery but also gives developed insights into the political dimensions that are their foundation as well as their continuing efforts to maintain a state. On a similar trajectory, Will McCants in The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of The Islamic State uses primary empirical material, for instance ancient Arabic religious texts, to analyze and discuss the apocalyptic vision being promoted in ISIS political, ideological, military, and mediated operations.⁹ Finally, worth mentioning is Patrick Cockburn’s The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.¹⁰ He ties the development of ISIS to failed US foreign policy and emphasizes the political and military backdrops of US-Middle Eastern politics as a pretext for current developments in the region.

There are other publications continuously being released that focus more on the political dimensions of the group or that are designed for a general reading audience. However, there has been a void regarding works dealing specifically and solely with ISIS’s highly developed and strategic use of media in recruitment and propaganda operations. In 2018, one of the first books examining this topic was published. The edited volume ISIS Beyond the Spectacle: Communication Media, Networked Publics, and Terrorism explores the ways ISIS presents itself and its mission to a broad audience and considers the media world ISIS has helped create.¹¹ Our book, The Media World of ISIS, continues this work and expands it. Media has been a crucial part of ISIS’s development and spread; to fully understand this organization, we must examine how it produces, publishes, and uses media in order to support the development and spread of its state project. By bringing together researchers from different backgrounds who are working on the same object of study, we feel this volume approaches a holistic—or whole-view—understanding of the media world of ISIS.

Media Ecology and the Shrinking State

The current political debate about ISIS is, to a large extent, characterized by claims that the organization is losing territory, capabilities, and the means to expand its self-declared caliphate, hinting that its days are numbered as the military coalition fighting it on the ground is advancing. The physical caliphate may well disappear in the near future, at least in the form we have come to know. The geographical loss of territory does cause problems for ISIS, especially as it loses the ability to connect controlled areas but also because of the loss of population and natural resources from which the group can collect taxes and revenue. There is, however, an ideological spread as well as territorial growth in other regions, most recently in Southeast Asia. As ISIS has lost territory in its physical caliphate, the number of terrorist attacks outside the Middle East, coordinated or inspired by the organization or its ideological messaging, has increased. There remains the possibility as well that ISIS will eventually regroup in rural areas of Iraq and Syria, gain strength and support, and come back in a new form.

These current conditions aside, the emergence and growth of ISIS, in particular through the aid of highly developed information operations and media strategies, is of huge importance to critically analyze and reflect on. More than five years have gone by since ISIS announced its caliphate, and for analysts and researchers, this provides an opportunity for a retrospective framework to emerge and offer not only years of empirical material (in terms of media artifacts) but also several trajectories of useful case studies and research publications to apply as focal points for discussion. Significant time has passed for reflection and a corpus of international research to develop, providing a foundation on which to build in-depth and nuanced contributions to this evolving and highly present field.

One aspect to consider when retrospectively approaching the plethora of dimensions concerning ISIS’s use of media is the transformative media environment. For the sake of clarity, the work of this volume is informed by the concept of media ecology, which allows us to consider the media infrastructure and interconnected relationships formed between ISIS’s central organization and its global supporter networks as a kind of world of its own. This ecological approach to media refers to the current rapidly shifting media saturated environment¹² and, despite oppositional perspectives and nuances within both social sciences and humanities regarding the term, we approach the new media ecology as characterized by a profound connectivity through which places, events, people, and their actions and inactions, seem increasingly connected.¹³ We believe this approach to be sufficiently dynamic in framing both the technical infrastructure and messaging of ISIS communication practices as well as the features of interconnectivity between supporters facilitated by these practices.

Media World Context

A key goal in ISIS’s media operations has been to make the communication and content come as close to everyday practices and media consumption as possible. By using widely popular social media platforms, applications, and messaging services, ISIS can ensure a broad audience is both intentionally and unintentionally exposed to its propaganda in the realm of everyday media use. This is not only the result of a strategy to make its media content more accessible, but it is also a deliberate choice by the Islamic State to play on mainly Western notions of how smartphones and social media are technologies contributing to the formation of both collective and individual identities. By embracing and utilizing the massive output on these everyday platforms, the virtual dimensions of ISIS increasingly intersect with media practices common for many.

Considering this in combination with the massive influx of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria, especially during 2014 and 2015, this propaganda strategy must to a large extent be regarded as successful. But since the military efforts of the coalition against ISIS have increased and gained momentum, the number of propaganda products produced by ISIS has been reduced. This does not mean that the media strategy or operations of ISIS have been reduced in significance. On the contrary, the more population and territory ISIS loses from its caliphate, the more it attempts to reach new populations and supporters in other countries. Much of ISIS’s propaganda is published in several languages, and a recent focus on Asia and Africa has resulted in several radical Islamist groups swearing allegiance to ISIS, which would seem to expand the Islamic State’s areas of control.

Over the course of 2017, we witnessed the spread of ISIS into North Africa as well as an increase in Europe of attacks directed or inspired by ISIS in cities such as Brussels, Nice, and Paris. All of this helped foment a sense of insecurity and fear, even as the Islamic State lost physical territory. Throughout its entire campaign, but even more intensely since 2016, ISIS has targeted audiences not only to convince them to travel to the caliphate in Iraq and Syria but also to establish networks of ideologically like-minded individuals in countries around the world. By using Western-style visual imagery and sophisticated production techniques, this propaganda is designed to appeal mainly to alienated Muslim youth living on different continents. It is designed to convince them that they can become part of the organization—either by traveling to the Islamic State or serving ISIS abroad—which turns the media into a kind of weapon—one familiar, ubiquitous, and hard to destroy.

And while Western mainstream media tend to emphasize the brutal beheading videos and horrific torture when reporting on ISIS, the vast majority of propaganda messages are about the complete opposite. It is in the nature of propaganda to create alternative views of the world, of politics, of religion, and of other people. Despite their extreme and violent Salafi-jihadist ideology and the enterprise of violence that it has become, ISIS puts much effort into trying to portray itself as something more than simply a brutal regime. Concepts of brotherhood, belonging, significance, equality, and religion are used as key motivational narratives and are all vital to gaining support and recruits from around the world. It is important to realize that in much of ISIS’s propaganda, the brutality aspect so widely known to the general public is only a tiny fraction of the entire corpus of ideological messages. The violence itself might appeal to a small number of the ideologically like-minded, but the promise of significance and belonging to something greater is by far more dominant. Images of happy children, caring fathers, a functioning state with education and health care flourish online—produced and spread to create a competitive system of meaning that challenges the Western portrayal of a brutal death cult. That also goes for ISIS’s heroic portrayal of their fighters, emphasizing how cool and adventurous it is to go to battle for the caliphate and retaliate against Western governments that they say oppress Muslims (as well as fight Shia Muslims, whom ISIS consider apostates).

Book Organization

Throughout this book, we scrutinize and discuss not only content, techniques, and infrastructure for production and dissemination of propaganda, but the entire media ecology utilized by ISIS. In contrast to security services and agencies, who strategically observe the propaganda with the aim of revealing plots and preventing attacks to keep our societies safe, we consider the media world of ISIS a kind of magnifying lens through which we can enhance our understanding of the organization itself.

The contributions to this volume are divided into three parts. As a contextual introduction to the mediation of legitimacy undertaken for the state project of their caliphate, the section Media and ISIS’s Imaginary Geography opens the book. Here chapters explore the construction of historical and religious claims of legitimacy in ISIS propaganda and myths around the caliphate, as well as civilizational discourses. As stated above, the media world of ISIS can be considered an extension and amplifier of the now-shrinking physical caliphate in Iraq and Syria, and the contributions in this first section approach this topic through various explanatory models. Combined, they address the existential arguments for the return of the caliphate and, above all, the role of mediation in this argumentation.

The second section, called Mediating Terror, evolves around more particular ISIS strategies of mediation, propaganda production, and dissemination. This includes an overview of the media infrastructure utilized and aspects of weaponizing social media and users around the world, as well as the different tactics and strategies of integrating supporter networks in the media operations. Dimensions of visual imagery and rhetorical appeals in the messaging, storytelling techniques, and visual strategies for promoting truth claims and justification arguments are also discussed in this section.

Finally, the book moves to the third and final section, Narratives of the Islamic State, and digs deeper into specific narratives, exploring how ISIS attempts to communicate certain perspectives on, among others, state-building, symbolism, mythology, victimhood, and gender. The magnitude and array of narratives and stories that are part of the media world of ISIS have different functions and target specific audiences. The chapters included in this last section deal with the specificities and narrative structure of these stories.

A Final Note

Our aim with this volume is not only to raise awareness of ISIS as a multidimensional enterprise of violence, but also to contribute to a larger debate on more effective political measures, counter-campaigning, and preventive work against violent extremism. Not only are the chapters of this book written by experts in various fields but they are also deliberately written in order to appeal to a wide audience. While we consider this book an important contribution to such academic disciplines as media and communication studies, peace and conflict studies, political science, history, and religious studies, we believe the book is also of value to the broader public. Our hope is that it not only provides and communicates insights into the goals and strategies of ISIS, but that it will also help us begin to understand how we can collectively work to prevent the spread of violent ideologies.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Graeme Wood, What ISIS Really Wants, The Atlantic, March 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/. This article is a good example of a longer in-depth piece about ISIS outside of the academic sphere.

2. Here we could have listed a vast amount of journal articles concerning ISIS and their media operations that have been published over the course of the last years. Many of them are, however, referenced throughout the chapters of this volume, but contributions like James P. Farwell, The Media Strategy of ISIS, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 56, no. 6 (2014): 49–55, was one of the first very significant contributions within the academic spheres focusing on the overall media and propaganda strategies of ISIS following the declaration of the caliphate in June 2014.

3. Muhammad al-‘Ubaydi, Nelly Lahoud, Daniel Milton, Bryan Price, The Group That Calls Itself a State: Understanding the Evolution and Challenges of the Islamic State, CTC at Westpoint, December 2014, https://ctc.usma.edu/app/uploads/2014/12/CTC-The-Group-That-Calls-Itself-A-State-December20141.pdf.

4. Loretta Napoleoni, The Islamist Phoenix: The Islamic State and The Redrawing of The Middle East (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014).

5. Benjamin Hall, Inside ISIS: The Brutal Rise of a Terrorist Army (New York: Center Street, 2015).

6. Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, 2nd ed. (New York: Regan Arts, 2016).

7. Abdel Bari Atwan, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).

8. Jessica Stern and J. M Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror (London: William Collins, 2015).

9. Will McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015).

10. Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (London: Verso, 2015).

11. Mehdi Semati, Piotr M. Spuznar, and Robert Alan Brookey, eds., ISIS Beyond the Spectacle: Communication Media, Networked Publics, and Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2018).

12. Akil N. Awan, Andrew Hoskins, and Ben O’Loughlin, Radicalization and Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology (London: Routledge, 2011), 5.

13. Ibid.

Bibliography

al-‘Ubaydi, Muhammad, Nelly Lahoud, Daniel Milton, and Bryan Price. The Group That Calls Itself a State: Understanding the Evolution and Challenges of the Islamic State. CTC at Westpoint, December 2014. https://ctc.usma.edu/app/uploads/2014/12/CTC-The-Group-That-Calls-Itself-A-State-December20141.pdf.

Atwan, Abdel Bari. Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

Awan, Akil N., Andrew Hoskins, and Ben O’Loughlin. Radicalization and Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology. London: Routledge, 2011.

Cockburn, Patrick. The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. London: Verso, 2015.

Farwell, James P. The Media Strategy of ISIS. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 56, no. 6 (2014): 49–55.

Hall, Benjamin. Inside ISIS: The Brutal Rise of a Terrorist Army. New York: Center Street, 2015.

McCants, William. The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

Napoleoni, Loretta. The Islamist Phoenix: The Islamic State and the Redrawing of the Middle East. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014.

Semati, Mehdi, Piotr M. Spuznar, and Robert Alan Brookey, eds. ISIS Beyond the Spectacle: Communication Media, Networked Publics, and Terrorism. London: Routledge, 2018.

Stern, Jessica, and J. M. Berger. ISIS: The State of Terror. London: William Collins, 2015.

Weiss, Michael, and Hassan Hassan. ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, 2nd ed. New York: Regan Arts, 2016.

Wood, Graeme. What ISIS Really Wants. The Atlantic, March 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/.

MICHAEL KRONA is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication Studies and Visual Communication at Malmö University, Sweden. He works within a nationally funded research project in Sweden, exploring Salafi-jihadist information operations, with particular focus on ISIS communication practices.

ROSEMARY PENNINGTON is Assistant Professor in Miami University’s Department of Media, Journalism, and Film. She is the coeditor, with Hilary Kahn, of On Islam: Muslims and the Media.

PART I

MEDIA AND ISIS’S IMAGINARY GEOGRAPHY

1The Myth of the Caliph

Suffering and Redemption in the Rhetoric of ISIS

Jason A. Edwards

SINCE ITS FOUNDING in 2010, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, often called ISIS, has grown in strength.¹ It has filmed high-profile executions for the world to see, recruited thousands of jihadists through sophisticated propaganda techniques, conducted terrorist attacks in more than a dozen countries, and conquered swaths of territory over Iraq and Syria. ISIS controlled so much territory at one time that it declared the formation of a new Islamic caliphate, and ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, anointed himself as Caliph Ibrahim. As later chapters in this volume will show, ISIS is extremely sophisticated in communicating its ideology and propaganda through social media; its magazine, Dabiq; and various speeches, sermons, and other public pronouncements setting forth an agenda for the world. ISIS has become one of the international community’s most dangerous foes and the focus of a multination military intervention in Iraq and Syria. Understanding the rhetoric ISIS uses to communicate to its supporters, to the Islamic community, and to the world in general offers an opportunity to ultimately combat the group’s message.

In his study of extreme Hindu nationalism, Abhik Roy argues it is the job of rhetoricians to explain the rhetoric of extremist groups so their narratives can be understood and confronted and counternarratives can be introduced.² Jerry Long and Alex Wilner note in their study of al-Qaeda that it is immersed in a war of narratives among the West, Middle Eastern governments, and its members. Long and Wilner expose the contradictions of al-Qaeda’s discourse and offer ways to delegitimize it to Muslims and the global community.³ ISIS has taken its narrative war into extremely sophisticated territory with its recruitment techniques, propaganda, use of social media, and overall rhetoric. Considering the conflict with ISIS is not just a military conflict but a battle of ideas, this chapter argues that it is imperative we gain a better understanding of ISIS’s rhetorical strategies. One major strategy is a reliance on mythic narratives.

Robert Rowland and Kirsten Theye claim terrorism is an inherently rhetorical act, and the rhetorical DNA of terrorism is a mythic/symbolic pattern that serves as a persuasive and epistemic device.⁴ Anthony Smith asserts the myth of the Golden Age is a narrative that terrorist groups have used to promote national renewal.⁵ Similarly, Abhik Roy and Robert Rowland maintain that a myth of return is a fundamental narrative extremists use to promote their belief system.⁶ Jason Edwards contends mythic themes of suffering and redemption underwrite the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden.⁷ Samuel Perry and Jerry Long explain that ISIS suicide-attack videos construct a mythic account of martyrdom to help recruit members.⁸ In this chapter, I argue that a fundamental myth underwriting the rhetoric of ISIS is the myth of the caliph. I suggest ISIS uses this myth to offer a sense of identity to Muslims, make sense of the chaotic modern world, and legitimize their caliphate by chronicling the suffering of Muslims over the past century, emphasizing that ISIS has brought redemption to the Islamic world.

The idea of the caliphate has been an important part of Islamic thought for fourteen hundred years. For some jihadists, the restoration of the caliphate by ISIS and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a vehicle for salvation.⁹ If ISIS’s followers die in the service of the true caliph, they believe they are guaranteed an exalted place in heaven. Musa Cerantonio, a prominent ISIS defender and spokesperson, asserted that Islam had finally been reestablished with the caliphate.¹⁰ Historically, the caliph is the religious, political, and military leader of all Muslims. Islamic sharia law cannot be truly implemented until a caliphate has been created and a new caliph anointed. Thus, the caliph is extremely important to Islam and to ISIS’s cause in general. According to al-Baghdadi’s logic, Muslims have long suffered without the strong rule of a supreme leader. Because the caliphate has been reestablished, ISIS argues, Muslims can rise up, cast off their oppressors, and regain the prominence they so richly deserve. Muslims who join, fight, and potentially die for the caliph are working in support of God’s anointed leader. By implication, they are part of God’s chosen community. Therefore, despite the suffering Muslims have experienced on earth, they are ultimately redeemed in the service of God’s chosen leader.

In order to fully explicate this argument, I analyze the rhetoric of ISIS’s caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He has made few public statements, but those he did produce, particularly his July 1, 2014, sermon on his new caliphate, offer important insights into the strategies and beliefs of ISIS, while potentially offering a means to counter its message. Thus, I begin with a discussion of the myth of the caliph. Then I unpack al-Baghdadi’s rhetorical strategies within the context of this myth. Finally, I offer some suggestions to counter this narrative.

Understanding Myth and the Islamic Caliphate

Myth is a common form of discourse. Rhetoric scholars have analyzed myths in a number of political situations.¹¹ Myths at their most basic are narratives. However, not all narratives are myths. A narrative of one’s day, for example, is not mythic, because myths involve stories that are ingrained into the specific political and cultural discourse of a society. These stories articulate the society’s beliefs, dilemmas, and values.¹² Rhetors who use myths offer audiences a way to frame the reality of a situation.

Myths perform a variety of functions for rhetors, three of which are most important to this study. First, myths help us make sense of the world around us. They provide people with a place in the social order of the universe.¹³ This function becomes most apparent when some form of disorder has befallen a community. All individuals and communities are struck by some sense of disorder in their lifetimes. This disorder can come in the wake of a natural disaster, an attack by another nation, an illness, a downturn in the economy, or other disturbances to the regularity of life. From this vantage point, the world looks too complicated to grasp—too much information, too many countries, and too many factors to manage all at once. It is here that myths are invoked to offer a sense of stability and structure. They provide a means of coping with all the disturbances around us. Myths, in this sense, work to clarify challenges that are a threat to our universe, opportunities that may pose a threat to our success, and the limitations within which we must work to accomplish an objective.

Second, myths perform an identity function. Myths offer people a worldview that helps them see the world as a whole instead of in pieces.¹⁴ This worldview generates a strong sense of identification. In this sense, myths provide a community with a form of social glue.¹⁵ Myths work to hold a group together by providing the basis for peoples of diverse backgrounds to find common ground with each other. This common ground defines who we were, are, and will be. Often a particular myth can unite a small or larger group around a common ideal, one that can be expanded further if the group accepts a specific casting of the myth. For instance, the myth of divine election holds that a community collectively believes it has an exclusive place within the overall order of communities. This community is special or chosen and destined for a unique mission that will demonstrate its exceptional nature to other communities.¹⁶ The sense of closeness within this mythic narrative serves to provide individuals and communities with a sense of identity and place.

Finally, myths work to establish political legitimacy. Obtaining, maintaining, and enhancing legitimacy is one of the key functions of political communication. Rhetors use myths to establish legitimacy by making overtures toward the past and using them in the present for their political purposes. Leaders often discuss important historical events in a way that suggests they are carrying on the legacy of their predecessors. The past is connected to the present to offer seamless continuity. American presidents often discuss their predecessors or historical events in a way that serves to sanction their current policies. For example, George W. Bush often mythologized World War II in his war on terror discourse.¹⁷ Bush discussed the sacrifice and heroism of the greatest generation in ways that made them seem larger than life. This is not to say that members of the World War II generation were not heroes. However, the exploits of that generation have become engrained in US social and political culture, exemplifying what it means to sacrifice. Their memory has become almost sacrosanct. For Bush, the mythologizing of World War II became a means to establish legitimacy for the war on terror.

There are a variety of different types of myths and specific themes that animate them. I assert that ISIS’s discourse is underwritten by the myth of the caliph, which contains a message of suffering and redemption at its core. George Schopflin asserts that myths that encompass prominent themes of suffering and redemption are used by a nation to explain its particularly sorrowful history, that it is undergoing or has undergone a process of expatiating its sins and will be redeemed or, indeed, may itself redeem the world.¹⁸ These themes tell a story of a nation or a people who have suffered but will be compensated for their powerlessness. Ultimately, that group will engage in redemptive acts to stop the suffering, which lays the groundwork to bring that community back to prominence. According to ISIS, true Muslims have long suffered under Western influence and domination, while Middle Eastern governments were not truly dedicated to Islam but maintaining their own power. ISIS is the